Right. So then the image is a little ridiculous no? The difference between MLs and anarchists has nothing to do with the MLs self-preservation practices and everything to do with using the state as its means. The reason MLs and anarchists cannot form an effective coalition is because MLs see the state as a tool and anarchists see the state as the problem and anarchists will always fight anyone who uses the state as a tool.
So then when MLs build their organizational structure, which is the state, and it engaged in self-preservation, what exactly is the critique? That because they focus on self-preservation they can’t be trusted? Because that’s what the text in the posted images seems to imply - you can’t work with MLs because they defend themselves.
Self-preservation in this instance means ML’s not dismantling the state and distributing power after they successfully gain control of the state.
They always preach this idea of them having control over the state is temporary, and that eventually they’ll give power to the workers, but in every case, they end up just being authoritarian dictators forever.
The longest running ML project is China, at 75 years. Given capitalism has existed for 400 years and states have existed for 5000 years, I think saying that 75 years is forever is maybe a tad melodramatic.
MLs not dismantling the state is self-preservation because they use the state for self-preservation. They don’t believe they can preserve the movement without the state during the transitionary period where imperialism still dominates the majority of the world’s people, natural resources, and military force. Anarchists disagree with that and believe that they can preserve the movement without the use of the state and in fact strictly forbid the use of the state in self-preservation. So the problem is not that MLs are focused on self-preservation nor that states engage in self-preservation but rather that MLs use the state as a tool and anarchists forbid using the state as a tool.
This is a critical distinction to be made and the image makes it seem like self-defense is the problem instead of the anarchist position that any use of the state, for any reason, is illegitimate.
MLs hold the position that the state will disappear as it becomes useless, much like how paid wake-up calling jobs disappeared with the advent of the alarm clock and castle masonry as a structured guild and discipline disappeared when gunpowder-based weapons made them obsolete.
MLs believe this because the state didn’t exist at some point in human history, and then it, eventually, it did exist. That is to say, the state was created to solve some problem in human society. MLs believe that this problem still exists in human society and thus states still exist, and thus if you eliminate the state but do not eliminate the preconditions that the state will reemerge because the problem the state solves still remains. MLs believe that only by discovering what the problems are that give rise to the state, and then solving those problems, will we be able to move as a species to a stateless human society.
Anarchists believe that the state is illegitimate in its essence, and that no use of the state is ever legitimate, and therefore that to have a stateless society we must decide to have a stateless society and then enforce that decision by any means necessary, except hierarchical means. Anarchists believe that the state in its essence reasserts its own existence and creates the very problems that it purports to solve and so will never arrive at the point of obsolescence. Instead the state must be removed and the problems must become unresolved and then new solutions to those problems need to be built that don’t involve a state.
This difference has nothing to do with self-preservation, as the OP indicates
In all the time the USSR existed, and in all the time that China and North Korea have been Marxist-Leninist spinoffs, none of those countries ever gave workers control of the means of production.
Billionaire CEO’s own the factories in China, and the people still there still live under the boot of capitalism, doing work for the very capitalists who they supposedly are fighting against.
USSR
Literally the definition of Soviet is council. The entire country was organized into democratic councils. Every single workplace was organized into a council. Yes, the workers were not allowed to plan quotas for the whole country, mostly because the workers in factories didn’t have access to all of the information about what all of their fellow countrymen needed. So there were other workers who were organized into other democratic councils and their job was to figure out what everyone in the country needed, and that information went up to the council of councils to determine the best way to meet all of the various short-term and long-term demands, of which there were no easy answers, so ANOTHER group of workers were organized into a council to research the question of how best to meet complex demands across a massive territory with a very low level of industry, which meant building the machines to build machines to build tools to build other machines.
And then the Nazis became ascendant, and the national security council made the decision to redirect production to prepare for war and the workers all had to follow those orders because the individual workers’ councils were not actually responsible for national security nor for analyzing geopolitics on the scale of 5-years or longer. And then the war hit and much of the country was forced to do whatever it took to survive.
And then immediately following the war the workers councils all worker together to rebuild the country. 8 years later, Kruschev took over, and he decided he wanted to create rich people again, so the whole ML thing sort of went out the window slowly as he and his cronies brought back liberalism, eroded the project of worker autonomy through councils, and ultimately just made everyone wage slaves while the oligarchs began to make plans for an alliance with the US to dominate the world and share all the wealth.
Billionaires do not control even half of the Chinese economy. They don’t own land in China. The government of the Communist Party is run through a hierarchy of councils, similar to the system of Soviets with a crucial difference - these councils spend a lot more time speaking directly with the masses and incorporating their feedback into their plans and adjusting based on the needs of the people.
In workplaces themselves, all state-owned enterprises have Staff and Worker Representative Congresses, and the state has now mandated that for most private companies. These congresses are democratic bodies that allow workers to participate in management decisions.
Both the USSR and China have had more democracy and more workplace democracy than any country in the Western sphere of influence ever.
DPRK
North Korea is literally still in the process of rebuilding its country after the USA bombed it to the literal stone age where Koreans had to live in caves to avoid napalm strafing because the Americans had literally destroyed every single building anyone could use to take cover in. The entire country was destroyed, every piece of infrastructure, every food source, every machine, every reserve of anything required for human life.
For the most part everyone in the country is a worker. There was no wealth to be had. In the present day, a number of “rich” North Koreans have accumulated stores of foreign capital through international trade, but domestically it’s not clear that there is a domestic wealth accumulation. You can’t own property. You can’t own companies. You can’t even really own cars. Everything is considered common property, managed by the state bureaucracy.
Work places are governed by workplace-specific councils that are part of the democratic centralist party. Quotas are still determined by the analyst workers groups, and generally for the good reason of managing scarcity of critical food, medicine, etc due to the crippling sanctions by the hegemonic West.
All of them
But again, we’re only talking about 75 years. It’s not that much time, especially when you consider a) war b) reconstruction c) Western siege d) literally no modern society has ever done it before and every country is trying to figure out how to function while also surviving in a world where the US will literally bomb your children, bomb your water supply, bomb your energy systems, bomb your schools, bomb your churches, kidnap your leaders, train/arm and deliver terrorists inside your country, and convince everyone else that if they trade with you they’ll bomb them, too.
The ML countries are the only countries that have ever done anything remotely successful in breaking from global imperial capitalism and creating the conditions to experiment with worker control of the entire country. It is a complex problem, not a switch. I know anarchists think everything can be prefigured, but anarchists are wrong.
famously super chill with calls for worker democracy, with super democratic and worker controlled councils that… Ultimately had to listen to the Supreme Soviets. Nice.
Both the USSR and China have had more democracy and more workplace democracy than any country in the Western sphere of influence ever.
“Billionaires are actually good as long as China controls them!” The conclusion of that article even says that it’s good to ‘make room for the hyper selfish so that they don’t leave China and cause brain-drain’. Like holy shit.
The ML countries are the only countries that have ever done anything remotely successful in breaking from global imperial capitalism
By… Becoming capitalists. Very 4D chess.
I know anarchists think everything can be prefigured, but anarchists are wrong.
That’s a different statement than what the image says. Yes, anarchists cannot work with MLs because MLs use the state as a tool of their revolution and anarchists reject the use of that tool. The two groups are incommensurate on this topic. While they both share the goal of a stateless society, one group requires the use of the state to achieve that goal and the other group strictly forbids the use of the state to achieve that goal.
I mean, it’s important to recognize that this is the anarchist’s theory. The ML theory is different. The ML theory is that the state will wither away when the conditions that give rise to the state change. The anarchist theory is that the conditions that give rise to the state will never change if the state is in place.
So far, neither theory has successfully ended the state.
That’s idealist and defeatist. Prefiguring the future society in our organizing is only one of our goals and not an end in itself.
So you’re saying that anarchists also prioritize self-preservation?
Are you saying all anarchists are suicidal and want to die? Of course we fucking value self-preservation.
Right. So then the image is a little ridiculous no? The difference between MLs and anarchists has nothing to do with the MLs self-preservation practices and everything to do with using the state as its means. The reason MLs and anarchists cannot form an effective coalition is because MLs see the state as a tool and anarchists see the state as the problem and anarchists will always fight anyone who uses the state as a tool.
Yes, and actually achieving their main goal in real life: establishing a stateless classless society.
So then when MLs build their organizational structure, which is the state, and it engaged in self-preservation, what exactly is the critique? That because they focus on self-preservation they can’t be trusted? Because that’s what the text in the posted images seems to imply - you can’t work with MLs because they defend themselves.
Self-preservation in this instance means ML’s not dismantling the state and distributing power after they successfully gain control of the state.
They always preach this idea of them having control over the state is temporary, and that eventually they’ll give power to the workers, but in every case, they end up just being authoritarian dictators forever.
The longest running ML project is China, at 75 years. Given capitalism has existed for 400 years and states have existed for 5000 years, I think saying that 75 years is forever is maybe a tad melodramatic.
MLs not dismantling the state is self-preservation because they use the state for self-preservation. They don’t believe they can preserve the movement without the state during the transitionary period where imperialism still dominates the majority of the world’s people, natural resources, and military force. Anarchists disagree with that and believe that they can preserve the movement without the use of the state and in fact strictly forbid the use of the state in self-preservation. So the problem is not that MLs are focused on self-preservation nor that states engage in self-preservation but rather that MLs use the state as a tool and anarchists forbid using the state as a tool.
This is a critical distinction to be made and the image makes it seem like self-defense is the problem instead of the anarchist position that any use of the state, for any reason, is illegitimate.
MLs hold the position that the state will disappear as it becomes useless, much like how paid wake-up calling jobs disappeared with the advent of the alarm clock and castle masonry as a structured guild and discipline disappeared when gunpowder-based weapons made them obsolete.
MLs believe this because the state didn’t exist at some point in human history, and then it, eventually, it did exist. That is to say, the state was created to solve some problem in human society. MLs believe that this problem still exists in human society and thus states still exist, and thus if you eliminate the state but do not eliminate the preconditions that the state will reemerge because the problem the state solves still remains. MLs believe that only by discovering what the problems are that give rise to the state, and then solving those problems, will we be able to move as a species to a stateless human society.
Anarchists believe that the state is illegitimate in its essence, and that no use of the state is ever legitimate, and therefore that to have a stateless society we must decide to have a stateless society and then enforce that decision by any means necessary, except hierarchical means. Anarchists believe that the state in its essence reasserts its own existence and creates the very problems that it purports to solve and so will never arrive at the point of obsolescence. Instead the state must be removed and the problems must become unresolved and then new solutions to those problems need to be built that don’t involve a state.
This difference has nothing to do with self-preservation, as the OP indicates
In all the time the USSR existed, and in all the time that China and North Korea have been Marxist-Leninist spinoffs, none of those countries ever gave workers control of the means of production.
Billionaire CEO’s own the factories in China, and the people still there still live under the boot of capitalism, doing work for the very capitalists who they supposedly are fighting against.
USSR
Literally the definition of Soviet is council. The entire country was organized into democratic councils. Every single workplace was organized into a council. Yes, the workers were not allowed to plan quotas for the whole country, mostly because the workers in factories didn’t have access to all of the information about what all of their fellow countrymen needed. So there were other workers who were organized into other democratic councils and their job was to figure out what everyone in the country needed, and that information went up to the council of councils to determine the best way to meet all of the various short-term and long-term demands, of which there were no easy answers, so ANOTHER group of workers were organized into a council to research the question of how best to meet complex demands across a massive territory with a very low level of industry, which meant building the machines to build machines to build tools to build other machines.
And then the Nazis became ascendant, and the national security council made the decision to redirect production to prepare for war and the workers all had to follow those orders because the individual workers’ councils were not actually responsible for national security nor for analyzing geopolitics on the scale of 5-years or longer. And then the war hit and much of the country was forced to do whatever it took to survive.
And then immediately following the war the workers councils all worker together to rebuild the country. 8 years later, Kruschev took over, and he decided he wanted to create rich people again, so the whole ML thing sort of went out the window slowly as he and his cronies brought back liberalism, eroded the project of worker autonomy through councils, and ultimately just made everyone wage slaves while the oligarchs began to make plans for an alliance with the US to dominate the world and share all the wealth.
China
https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/
Billionaires do not control even half of the Chinese economy. They don’t own land in China. The government of the Communist Party is run through a hierarchy of councils, similar to the system of Soviets with a crucial difference - these councils spend a lot more time speaking directly with the masses and incorporating their feedback into their plans and adjusting based on the needs of the people.
In workplaces themselves, all state-owned enterprises have Staff and Worker Representative Congresses, and the state has now mandated that for most private companies. These congresses are democratic bodies that allow workers to participate in management decisions.
Both the USSR and China have had more democracy and more workplace democracy than any country in the Western sphere of influence ever.
DPRK
North Korea is literally still in the process of rebuilding its country after the USA bombed it to the literal stone age where Koreans had to live in caves to avoid napalm strafing because the Americans had literally destroyed every single building anyone could use to take cover in. The entire country was destroyed, every piece of infrastructure, every food source, every machine, every reserve of anything required for human life.
For the most part everyone in the country is a worker. There was no wealth to be had. In the present day, a number of “rich” North Koreans have accumulated stores of foreign capital through international trade, but domestically it’s not clear that there is a domestic wealth accumulation. You can’t own property. You can’t own companies. You can’t even really own cars. Everything is considered common property, managed by the state bureaucracy.
Work places are governed by workplace-specific councils that are part of the democratic centralist party. Quotas are still determined by the analyst workers groups, and generally for the good reason of managing scarcity of critical food, medicine, etc due to the crippling sanctions by the hegemonic West.
All of them
But again, we’re only talking about 75 years. It’s not that much time, especially when you consider a) war b) reconstruction c) Western siege d) literally no modern society has ever done it before and every country is trying to figure out how to function while also surviving in a world where the US will literally bomb your children, bomb your water supply, bomb your energy systems, bomb your schools, bomb your churches, kidnap your leaders, train/arm and deliver terrorists inside your country, and convince everyone else that if they trade with you they’ll bomb them, too.
The ML countries are the only countries that have ever done anything remotely successful in breaking from global imperial capitalism and creating the conditions to experiment with worker control of the entire country. It is a complex problem, not a switch. I know anarchists think everything can be prefigured, but anarchists are wrong.
famously super chill with calls for worker democracy, with super democratic and worker controlled councils that… Ultimately had to listen to the Supreme Soviets. Nice.
Hm…
Hmmm…
“Billionaires are actually good as long as China controls them!” The conclusion of that article even says that it’s good to ‘make room for the hyper selfish so that they don’t leave China and cause brain-drain’. Like holy shit.
By… Becoming capitalists. Very 4D chess.
Thank goodness you’re here to inform all us Anarchists how wrong we are. I’m sure we’d all be lost without your help.
The critique is the state is a tool of oppression. We can’t work with MLs because they are authoritarians and thus part of the problem.
That’s a different statement than what the image says. Yes, anarchists cannot work with MLs because MLs use the state as a tool of their revolution and anarchists reject the use of that tool. The two groups are incommensurate on this topic. While they both share the goal of a stateless society, one group requires the use of the state to achieve that goal and the other group strictly forbids the use of the state to achieve that goal.
It has nothing to do with self-preservation.
Self-preservation of the state means exercising authority over the citizens. It means the state will never wither away, it will only maintain itself.
I mean, it’s important to recognize that this is the anarchist’s theory. The ML theory is different. The ML theory is that the state will wither away when the conditions that give rise to the state change. The anarchist theory is that the conditions that give rise to the state will never change if the state is in place.
So far, neither theory has successfully ended the state.